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Bernard Muhia - My Blog
Bernard Muhia - My Blog
Inspiration for the youth
Related to country: Kenya

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My name is Bernard Muhia. I am a 24 year old Kenyan male. I am a journalist by training but currently unemployed. Due to my unemployed status and with no sources of income, I am living with my single parent.

Over the past one year, I have been volunteering as an administrator with a professional body. As a young person, full of vitality and creativity, I have been less and less inspired at work over the last three months. There hasn’t been any challenging projects or assignments and that made me gradually withdraw from the organization. I have to say that I don’t have anything principally against the organization though.

A lot of young people’s creativity and energy is fizzled out in their mundane jobs, jobs that they can’t quit because they still have to pay the bills or are too afraid to follow their true dreams and passionate desires. The only remedy that they resort to is to constantly change jobs hoping to find one that inspires them. Since most of their managers and supervisors are over 40 years old, and believe in systems and maintaining the status quo, there is no way that these young employees can express their creative energies for the benefit of their employers. Individualism has also not been appreciated in most corporate cultures. The human resource manager stresses team building and collective responsibility and thus the quiet ones remain so, and the creative ones hold back.

The society is fragmented more than ever before as seen in the ever rising cases of divorce and extreme anti-social behaviour. When a family unit disintegrates either through divorce, separation or otherwise death of parents due to AIDS or any other causes, the children grow up traumatized. This country has inadequate resources, facilities and personnel to handle childhood trauma that is commonplace.

To make a bad situation worse, the high rate of unemployment in this country has left in its wake a generation of young people who have despaired and lost hope in ‘the system’ and also in themselves. Poverty is not a lack of or inadequacy of resources but a state of mind of resignation gotten from that external lack of or inadequacy of resources. A percentage of today’s successful people have very poor and seemingly hopeless backgrounds but it’s their state of mind that changed for them to rise above that background and come out successful.

It is this state of mind, which results from the real or perceived inadequacy of resources, the childhood trauma arising from disintegration of the family unit and lack of organizational support to express young people’s creative energies that moves me to want to run an inspirational program for the youth. My goal is to help young people to grow and develop by overcoming any emotional blocks, limiting beliefs, low self esteem and self destructive behaviours that are blocking the road to abundant success in their lives.

Being a young person, and having experienced all of the above puts me in the right position to get through to and be accepted by the youth. The youth as defined by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports are any persons over the age of 15 years but under the age of 30 years. I envision coordinating my efforts through a proposed youth center for excellence named ‘Under30.com’. The motto of the youth center for excellence will be ‘Make friends with success by following your bliss’.

To help me better understand the task that lies ahead, I am taking an approach used by universities which is writing dissertations or theses. I am preparing to write a book titled ‘Being a youth; A guide to the challenges, needs and aspirations of a youth’. I will carry out a survey among 200 young people to establish the following:

1. What challenges do you face as a young person; physically, socially, emotionally, spiritually, politically, economically and intellectually? (Give seven answers, one for each state, i.e. outline physical challenges, social challenges etc).

2. What are your needs in the physical, social, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, political and economic spheres? (Answer for all spheres).

3. What are your aspirations professionally, politically and socially? (Answer where applicable).

Their answers will form the basis of my book. Using the book as a guide, I will embark on the inspirational program. The program will involve screening an inspirational video program designed for the youth. The video program has been developed by Jack Canfield who is an author, motivational speaker and teacher by training. He trained at Harvard University and later at the University of Massachusetts in the U.S.A. He has also written a book titled ‘The success principles’ which will be issued to the youth benefiting from this program.

Due to the fact that this is my first time embarking on such a task, and going by the guidelines of the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, I will form a linkage between the youth center for excellence and Peak Performance International. Peak Performance International is an organization that has experts in the human growth and development field. This synergy will ensure that the program is run by the youth, benefits the youth, but is mentored by experts in human growth and development. Their input will enrich the inspirational program with relevant content and the right delivery.

The program first aims to target the youth through already established structures. The first group is the youth benefiting directly through loans from the Youth Enterprise Development Fund. Their number is 22,000 young people across the country as quoted by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports. The second group is composed of students. These are secondary school students, university and polytechnic students across the country.

If a country’s youth are critical to the growth of the economy and to the internal security of the country, then the youth agenda should be given the attention of a national disaster. Handing out loans is the right gesture, but if the recipients are living in a state of despair and lack motivation, then the money will be of little consequence. And if students in secondary schools, universities and polytechnics continue to strike and disrupt their studies because they see the future as being bleak due to the high unemployment rate, then we have a failed education system.

I will reiterate that poverty is not a lack of or inadequacy of resources, but a state of mind of resignation gotten from the external lack or inadequacy of resources. A percentage of today’s successful people have very poor and hopeless backgrounds, but it’s their state of mind that changed, for them to rise above that background and come out successful. Our youth need inspiration to change their state of mind from despair and resignation to hope and inspiration.

July 7, 2008 | 3:21 AM Comments  0 comments

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